Does time to surgery affect breast cancer outcomes?
There’s always going to be some amount of time between diagnosis and surgery. This is because a healthcare team will do preoperative tests to better understand your cancer. It can also sometimes take time to schedule your surgery.
There’s no standard for how soon you should have surgery after a breast cancer diagnosis.
However, it’s possible that delays in having surgery can affect breast cancer outcomes. A longer delay could potentially lead to the growth or progression of your cancer.
A 2016 studyTrusted Source looked at time to surgery in 94,544 people with breast cancer. Time to surgery was divided up into five 3-month intervals:
less than 30 days
31 to 60 days
61 to 90 days
91 to 120 days
121 to 180 days
The researchers found that overall survival was lower with each increasing delay interval. They noted that while preoperative evaluations are important, a shorter time to surgery should be pursued, if possible.
How long is too long?
Because time to surgery can affect outlook, you may be wondering how long is too long to wait. Generally speaking, it’s ideal to keep the time to surgery as short as you can while considering necessary preoperative tests and decision making.
Research on this topic is conflicting. For example, studies from 2017Trusted Source and 2022 found that the outlook for people with breast cancer wasn’t affected until time to surgery surpassed 60 days.
A 2018 reviewTrusted Source examined studies on the time to treatment and how outlook was affected. Based on their review, the author noted that a time from diagnosis to surgery of less than 90 days was optimal for outlook.
A 2020 studyTrusted Source that looked at the effects of time to first breast cancer treatment supports this. It concluded that a longer time to first treatment, defined as 31 to 90 days, would promote more thorough diagnostic testing and decision making without compromising survival.
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